Entering the CCA Gallery one may experience the tones, colors and scents of Summer as it sounds, looks and smells according to the gifted German artist Helga Schmidhuber; our current artist-in-resident.

We are probably familiar with the feeling of seeing a beautiful piece of art, and no matter how much we attempt to find the right words to describe exactly what it is that touches us, we rarely succeed. Many of us are in a similar way capable of recognizing and appreciating the scent of fresh rain touching the earth, but only few people know, that there’s actually a word for it. It’s called Petrichor.

To the painter Helga Schmidhuber Petrichor is synonym with the smell of Summer, and the longing for Summer, which is exactly what made her recognize her synesthesia as a child. This feeling returned to her last year in April 2016 when she came to visit CCA Andratx. During her 10 days in Mallorca she created a series of “Petrichor”-drawings depicting prosimians in surroundings impossible to decipher whether is a jungle or underwater or perhaps even on a different planet. This unexplainable, at once ancient and futuristic, is what fascinates Schmidhuber. Just as the prosimians are neither apes nor humans, but something different in between, the phenomena Petrichor is neither rain nor earth, but rather an event taking place in symbiosis between the two.

The etymology of Petrichor derives from the Greek ‘petra’ meaning ‘stone’ combined with ‘ichor’: the fluid that flows in the veins of immortals. Accordingly, blurring the boundaries between natural and cultural history, Schmidhuber is painting naturescapes on top of traditional Majorcan fabric which is normally used as dishtowels. Bringing the fabric out of the kitchen and into her studio, she’s sewing her own canvas and providing it with new layers of function as well of meaning. Also discarded drums of her husband as well as geographical maps have left their usual surroundings to become part of the story that Helga Schmidhuber is inviting us to dive into during autumn season 2017.

Helga Schmidhuber was born in 1972 in Wiesbaden, Germany. Initially she studied communication design focusing on graphics. Following this, she studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Dieter Krieg and Albert Oehlen. Helga Schmidhuber’s works have been displayed in numerous exhibitions in Germany as well as internationally and she has participated in numerous artist-in-residence programs. Her work is characterized by expressiveness, a strong and subtle sense of materiality and a continuous love of experimentation.